Office 365 Hybrid Mailbox Move stuck in ‘Removing’ state

This is an issue I’ve come across more than once now. An attempted mailbox move from Exchange 2010/2013 to Office 365 has failed and you want to remove the migration batch and try again. You try to remove the batch, but it just gets stuck in the ‘Removing’ state for an extended period of time. We need to give this request the finger and start from scratch, but how?

First things first, lets check the status of the move using Powershell, as Powershell will never lie! Login to Exchange Online Powershell, and run:

get-migrationbatch -identity <nameofbatch> | fl

If the status does read as ‘Removing’ and it’s been a long time since you started the removal, then you likely have a corrupted batch. Let’s forcefully remove it. To remove the batch, run:

Remove-migrationbatch -identity <nameofbatch> -force

If you now run the get-migrationbatch command above, you should get an error which states that the batch does not exist. Good news! We now just need to clear out the migration user requests which will still be lingering. To see which user requests exist, run:

Get-MigrationUser

If the only users in here are the users which were associated with your migration batch, then you can run:

Get-MigrationUser | Remove-MigrationUser -Force

to remove all of the migration user requests. However if there are other user requests in here which you do not want to remove, then remove the users individually by running:

Remove-MigrationUser <Identity> -Force

Now if you run the Get-MigrationUser command, you should see that the users who were in the corrupted batch are no longer listed. You can start a new batch once you’ve resolved whatever issue caused the mailbox move to fail and all should be tickety-boo 🙂

In our case we were running mailbox export commands at the same time as mailbox migrations, and we had some timeout issues with the Mailbox Replication Service. The error we received in the migration report was “Relinquishing job because of large delays due to unfavorable server health or budget limitations”. Simple fix, just remove the migration batch once the exports were complete, and start again. What we didn’t bank on would be that the migration batch would become corrupted. To resolve this, we allowed our mailbox exports to complete, and then restarted the Microsoft Exchange Replication Service. We then cleared the corrupted batch using the commands shown above, and started in again. It completed successfully this time.

Hello, I’m running on EX2010 Hybrid logged into o365 as a global admin and AADMPS will not recognise the -Force param, any ideas? This mailbox has been stuck in “Removing” state over 12 hours. Initially tried to remove online through GUI and now via PS, same result.